Hello, listeners, and welcome back to another episode of Healing the Unresolved: Putting the Past in the Past. Today we’re going to do a discussion on the topic of avoidance. Avoidance is a topic that has come up in bits and pieces in previous podcasts, but in this particular episode we’re going to do a much deeper dive into it.

Avoidance is when we engage in a behavior that serves to protect us from having a certain experience again. I’ll repeat that. Avoidance is when we engage in a behavior that serves to protect us from having a certain experience again. All of us, at one time or another in our life, even if we never suffered a painful or traumatic experience, have practiced avoidance, and probably fairly often. Very often it’s innocuous, and we’re often quite conscious that we do it. For example, perhaps we went to a restaurant and we had a bad experience, and we say, “I’m never going to go back to that restaurant again.” Well, we are right to do that. That would not be an unhealthy example of avoidance; it’s rather prudent. In the end, it’s not really going to cost me anything or deprive me of anything if I decide to not go back to that restaurant again. Or if I watch a movie and it was just a bad movie, well, quite frankly, why would I go back and watch the same movie again?

The only time, really, it could become a problem is if we go and have a bad dining experience because the food didn’t taste good, and then suddenly we stop eating out at all in our life, where we never again go have dinner out again. That would be quite tragic. Or what if we went to see a movie that wasn’t a good movie, and then suddenly decided: I will never go to another movie again. It sounds extreme, like: Who does that, just because they had a bad meal or saw a bad movie? But the reality is certainly we do that in our life, and we do it with some of the bigger, more painful experiences. So where avoidance becomes problematic is when it is employed in such a way that it robs us of some of the most beautiful life experiences, and ironically the ones that actually can heal us.

Some of our avoidances we’re very conscious of—we know we’re doing it—but some of the deeper, more debilitating forms of avoidance are happening on an unconscious level, that it’s so ingrained in us that we just can’t see it. We have a hard time when we’re living in function of a painful or traumatic experience, we have a hard time seeing the forest from the trees, but in the healing work we can be deliberate and find ways to kind of step back in our life and widen that field of view and see the forest from the trees, and really just see where the avoidance is or may be occurring in our life.

This avoidance that we speak of, when it becomes problematic is when we employ this with people, with intimacy, with vulnerability, with relationships, with events, or even the deeper experiences in life. It’s no fun way to live! And it costs us dearly. It shrinks our life and narrows our field of view, because we kind of develop a myopic view in life, one of constant threat, assessment, and avoidance. It consumes and exorbitant amount of time and energy and focus, often living in function of a threat that no longer exists. In doing so, we miss the present. Our present life passes us by as we squander the time that God has given us by living in function of our past or a past experience.

And so, as we’ve often said in the past when we have discussed this, avoidance is short-term gain but long-term pain, because ultimately we avoid so as not to re-experience. That’s what’s at the core of avoidance. We’re avoiding basically to just not have a certain re-experience again. Sometimes it serves a healthy function, when it’s done in a very focused way, in a very conscious way. Avoidance can be responsible sometimes and even be good decision-making, but that’s not what we’re talking about today. We’re talking about when we have a painful life experience that causes us to completely disengage critical aspects of life, because very often we end up cutting off more than we need to. For example, if I have a bad meal, I’m just going to avoid that restaurant, not all restaurants. But when we suffer a painful or traumatic experience, our avoidance or what we cut off or avoid isn’t often focused; there’s a lot of collateral damage in our life. We’ll just cut off relationships completely, or trusting others ever again, or being vulnerable, or giving up control, or whatever it might be.

And so we employ various means to practice avoidance. One of them is control. When people have control issues, or when we have control issues, it is often or always a form of avoidance: avoidance of not being in control. Kind of like if I am not in control, then blank will never happen again. So people who are practicing— who have control issues often have a belief operating or a fear—a fear that if I am not in control, then blank will happen again, usually harm in some way. Perhaps it’s rejection, powerlessness, abuse, an ego wound. Often if we’re struggling with a narcissistic personality, it’s the fear of that ego wound, so I have to be in control and manipulate others.

But a controlling person is trying to protect themselves. So on the exterior, that controlling person might present as dominant and strong, like a dominant, strong-looking person, but on their inside is someone who is really quite afraid of what might happen if we don’t have control. And whatever that is is what we are seeking to avoid. Man, I just can’t give up control, because if I give up control then blank is going to happen again. And of course, whatever’s in that blank—it’s different for each one of us—is precisely what we’re trying to avoid.

And one of the most damaging aspects of avoidance is that it traps us in our pain and prevents healing. As long as we are avoiding, we are depriving ourselves of the very experience that might heal us, ones that might be positive and give us new memories, new experiences that override what the past ones taught us. With avoidance, we don’t grow; we shrink, we stay stuck. Avoidance, you could say even, is one of the ways that trauma stays timeless. It becomes an unceasing event that we forever live in function of—well, at least until there’s an intervention, till we become aware of it or maybe somebody points it out to us or we reach a point where “I can’t live like this any more” or maybe by accident we end up having a really positive experience—maybe it’s one where our avoidance wasn’t successful, where we couldn’t just get out of it, maybe it was something at work or something—and then it ends up being a wonderful experience!

And then suddenly we have this profound moment, like: “What have I been doing? All these years, I’ve been avoiding these experiences, and here finally I couldn’t avoid it, and look what happened. It was a wonderful experience! That bad experience did not happen again, and people were wonderful. They were helpful, they were affirming, they were healing, and all these years that I lost cutting myself off from others…” It’s a painful but yet a beautiful moment, and then we suddenly decide: “I can’t live like this any more, with all this avoidance.” You see, we have to have those new experiences.

Like I said, it’s very sad—tragic—when trauma and avoidance kind of knock our present life offline, and not just our present life but our future life. The more time that we are spending in the present, living in function of the past, it absolutely affects our future, without a doubt, because it keeps us trapped in the past. Sometimes even we may think we are better. “I talked it out. I grieved. I wept. I journaled.” But then, inevitably, sometimes we might catch a glimpse that we are still engaging in avoidance in our life, chronic playing-it-safe, going through life in a defensive or guarded disposition, as though our past experience is still alive and lurking around the corner to get us again.

A very key point to make here is that unresolved negative beliefs that we learned about ourselves and others and the world as a result of our painful experiences fuel our avoidance. I’ll repeat that again. Unresolved negative beliefs that we learned about ourselves and others and the world in which we live as a result of our painful experience fuel our avoidance. And it takes the form of this. Because if I allow this experience to happen again, then it will mean blank. That’s always operating behind avoidance. If I allow this to happen again, then it will mean that blank is true. Maybe that I was weak, that I failed, that I wasn’t good enough—whatever it might be. But of course, that’s not what it will mean. For example, if I believe that if someone gets— If as a result of my painful or traumatic experiences or just a disrupted childhood, whatever it might be—if I believe that if someone gets upset at me then I have failed, then I’m going to go to great lengths to please others and to kind of manage their emotions, to make sure they never get upset at me. But the reality is just because someone gets upset at us doesn’t mean that we failed. Of course, it might not even mean that we did something wrong, because, let’s be honest, people often get upset when there is no real offense. Sometimes we may have done something wrong, and hopefully we’ll admit it and apologize, but often people get upset at us when we might not have done something wrong.

Once I identify and revise and resolve that negative belief that the past experience taught me about myself or others or about the world, or even about God, it can lessen and even end my avoidance. For example, once I master the realization that just because someone is upset doesn’t mean that I did something wrong or failed, then all of a sudden my avoidance no longer serves a function; I no longer invest in it. I no longer invest so much energy and time into people-pleasing or managing or assuming responsibility for the emotions of others. This is very important, actually.

Once I assimilate the belief that— or another belief: I’m going to use a second example right now. Let’s say it’s the belief that—which often happens with people—it was my fault. Self-blame is just so common with painful or traumatic experiences, especially if we were younger. Once I assimilate the belief that “oh, it was not my fault,” and I actually don’t just believe it but I feel it, it will lessen my avoidance of vulnerability, of intimacy and closeness, because bad things don’t happen because of me. So if bad things don’t happen because of me, then it’s safe for me to be around other people, that I won’t bring bad things to other people and then they won’t reject me. We could go on and on with other examples, but just trying to demonstrate how unresolved negative beliefs from past experiences can drive our avoidance.

Also, I want to say that if our memories— Again, we’ve talked about this in the past, but this fits into our discussion. If a memory was not integrated properly into a past narrative, that means it gets easily triggered, and that can throw us into incidents of avoidance, where we suddenly withdraw or avoid. If we suspect that, yeah, there’s just some traumatic or painful—or just painful memories; it does not have to be traumatic—memories that I have, that it’s like they’re still alive, still active in a present narrative, not in a past one, then when we encounter something in the present that reminds us of the past, it makes us feel like we’re in the past all over again. That neural network of memories gets activated, and we feel like we’re experiencing that all over again. That’s not always, but sometimes that’s the case, and that’s when we talked about trying EMDR. But enough of that.

So we have to have new experiences. We have to have new experiences, and that’s precisely what avoidance doesn’t allow us. It never allows us new experiences. So we have to have new experiences and to let go, to do the thing we fear. There’s a mantra in the counseling field: “Do the thing you fear, and the death of that fear will be certain.” So the opposite of avoidance can be summed up in that one statement: “Do the thing we fear. Do the thing you fear.” To reconnect to the life that was and could have been but wasn’t. There’s a lot in that sentence. To reconnect tot he life that was and could have been but wasn’t. To give things a second chance, to give ourselves a second chance. Stopping avoidance, a second chance at life, that we can salvage something from the time God has given us. Stopping avoidance means we reconnect with our life before it was interrupted by that past lousy or painful experience. It is a coming back to life, putting our cards back on the table, so to speak; to give life and others another chance. That life and others can be something other than what it was or what they were.

And when we do that, yes, we might get hurt again, but we need to embrace that. That it’s still not the same before, that no matter what that past experience is over. So even if we get hurt again, that doesn’t mean the past is happening all over again. In fact, if we do get hurt again, we can embrace it and be resilient. “Yes, I was hurt again, but that doesn’t mean it was my fault, and it doesn’t mean I failed, and it doesn’t mean I was weak, and it doesn’t mean that I did anything wrong.”

Life will disappoint, and sometimes it won’t. People will disappoint, and sometimes they won’t. But either way, it’s not the past happening all over again. Nothing fast-tracks healing and resolution more than going back to that area of our life where we were hurt and trying it again.

Now, just as a disclaimer of course, if we were hurt by an abuser, then we don’t go back to the abuser. Let me be clear about that. So we don’t go back to a situation of harm, but we do return to relationships and to love and to trusting again. That was the abuser, but that’s not all of humanity. If we were verbally abused, we go back to group dynamics and relationships and activity, well, that could result in negative evaluation in some way, to talking to people again. And if we were rejected, we go back to initiating plans, asking people to do stuff, being vulnerable, and back to initiating conversations. It’s literally a coming back to life. You see, avoidance chokes off our emotional circulation; not so much our blood flow, but our emotional flow. Avoidance chokes off our emotional circulation. A part of us kind of stops living.

So, to summarize, just to conclude, the second time around is almost always better. We just have to give ourselves and allow ourselves the new experience. And of course it takes a lot of courage and hope to be vulnerable again. That’s all we’re going to say today about avoidance. If anyone has time and if you’ve read the first book, Healing Your Wounded Soul: Growing from Pain to Peace, or Healing Work: Giving Humanity a Second Chance, please consider doing a review, maybe on the Ancient Faith website or one of the other platforms where they’re being sold—only because it’s always good to get feedback, especially on that second book; still looking for more on that. Thank you, and have a blessed day!